The Integrator
The presenting problem
"I'm the integration point."
She used this phrase in our first session and I've been sitting with it since.
She's the one who translates between engineering and commercial. Who sees connections her organisation doesn't want to name. Who holds the complexity that doesn't fit in any job description.
Too valuable to promote. Too complex to replace.
The organisation hadn't created this problem deliberately. It had evolved. Over eight years she'd become the person everyone routed through — not because of her title, but because of what she could see. The patterns across divisions. The dependencies nobody mapped. The political dynamics that determined which projects survived and which died quietly.
She came to coaching exhausted. Not from the work — from being the only one who saw the whole picture.
What was underneath
The question she arrived with: How do I hold less?
The question we ended up working with: How do I hold it differently?
The distinction matters. "Holding less" assumes the problem is volume. Drop some responsibilities, delegate some connections, say no more often. Standard coaching advice. And it would have failed, because the issue wasn't how much she held. It was how she held it.
She held it as identity.
Being the integration point wasn't something she did. It was who she was. Take away the complexity and she didn't feel free — she felt invisible. The part of her that had built this irreplaceable role had done so for a reason: if I'm the only one who can do this, I can never be discarded.
That's not a workload problem. That's a belonging problem wearing a workload disguise.
The shift
Sessions one through five were mapping. What are the parts? What do they protect? Where did this strategy begin?
The integration pattern started in childhood — she was the translator between two parents who couldn't communicate directly. She learned early that being the bridge between disconnected systems was how you earned your place. Indispensable. Irreplaceable. Safe.
Thirty years later, the same strategy was running her professional life.
Once she could see it — "oh, I'm doing the family thing at work" — the grip loosened. Not immediately. Not comfortably. But the pattern became visible, which meant it became a choice.
Sessions six through nine were about experimenting. What happens if you don't bridge? What happens if you let two departments miscommunicate and deal with the consequences themselves? What happens if you're not the smartest person in the room about cross-functional dynamics?
She hated it. Every experiment felt like abandonment. The part of her that was the bridge interpreted stepping back as letting people fall.
But the organisation didn't collapse. In fact, something unexpected happened: other people started integrating. Not as well as she could. But well enough. And in the process, her team developed capabilities she'd been unintentionally preventing.
Where she landed
She didn't stop being an integrator. That would have been the wrong outcome — the capacity was real and valuable. But it moved from subject to object. From something that had her to something she had.
The shift was from weight to choice. From I must hold this or everything falls to I can hold this, and I can also not hold this, and either way I still exist.
By session fifteen she'd restructured her role. Still the integration point for strategic decisions. But she'd built three people underneath her who could handle the operational connecting. She was working fewer hours. Sleeping better. And — this surprised her most — enjoying the work again.
Not because the work changed. Because she changed. The integration point became something she offered from capacity, not from compulsion.
What I took from it
"Too valuable to promote, too complex to replace" isn't a compliment. It's a trap. And the person it traps is usually the one who built it — not from ambition, but from a deep, often invisible need to be indispensable.
The work isn't learning to hold less. It's understanding what the holding is for. Once that's visible, the leader doesn't need to choose between exhaustion and irrelevance. They find a third option — one that includes themselves in the equation.
Not from weight to lightness. From identity to choice.
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